3D printed ruins

So, the end of last month was my birthday and I got a load of Amazon vouchers. Aside from the inevitable DVDs or books, although never my preferred gaming store, it’s sometimes worth a look. I’ve had some 3D printed barricades from Amazon before - painted for my stalled MC-1 project (not sure if I’ve ever shared them anywhere), but they’re decent for the price, as are these ruins which easily fill a gap in my terrain options.

Are they perfect? No. Could I make my own? Maybe, but I’m not replicating those pillars and arches over and over again. So these are decent. Layer lines are an issue close up, but they will look fine on the tabletop.

This large single piece is one set, the puddle base adds a bit of rubble, but the layer lines are a bit more obvious when you’re looking at higgledy piggledy blocks. So that was pimped with some texture paste initially and then with some Grimdark scatter from Krautcover (via Bad Squiddo). I used the dead static grass I’d used on the marshland to give a decayed “all is not well here” feel…

The vines were added to hide a frankly lazy bit of 3D sculpting present here and in one of the other pieces I got, where two elements form the corner and the arches bleed into each other. If QP3D should ever read this, you really should clean that up. You manage it on the T and X walls, but not on the L shaped walls.

So, the second set was a set of four, a straight and the aforementioned X, T and L walls. These are the same to all intents and purposes. Aside from the bleeding arch, the only real flaw is the straight isn’t very stable and the joy for me of these was the minimal basing. One nudge of the table and that will topple, so I added my own puddle base, tried to replicate the one on the large L and it’s nice and sturdy now.

As said before, the L has that bleed, so vines again.

And completely absent from the T and X.

And finally, a look at the tops. The sculpts had a kind of broken  mortar effect, which is a little visible in places, but the tops got hit with Grimdark cover and the dead grass. Quite happy with the final pieces.

As I said, available from Amazon or their own website (https://qp3dwargames.co.uk/) where these appear to be part of a nice pseudo Osgiliath range.

More vampires…

And a couple more vampires, this time from the official North Star range and evocative of the Fearless Vampire Killers. They match well enough with the Oldman Vlad. She is a beast though in metal, so many magnets for storage to keep her in place.

 

Vampires of great age…

A couple of ancient vampires for Silver Bayonet.

First off, a board game piece I got off eBay, I forget the game. Obviously based on Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, I didn’t notice until I was painting the face that mini was lacking a defined nose. Rather than add a greenstuff nose midpaint, I remembered my folklore and painted it as a missing nose and open nostrils, as suspected vampires would be buried face down so the nose would rot first and prevent them walking unnoticed amongst the living.

And a lovely mini from Statuesque Miniatures (sadly no longer on their website) of an alien Egyptian god with definite fangs. I forget which novel I read had the origins of vampires going back to Ancient Egypt (I think it was part of the Supping With Panthers series), but this fits perfectly. The figure has some wonderful delicately sculpted hieroglyphics on his chest, thigh, forearms and spine - and they were a bugger to make pop, I was really happy with the strange skin tone, but had real difficulty making the glyphs stand out. The spine especially just wouldn’t pop and after too many attempts, I realised I was loosing the detail. I could try and strip the whole mini or just admit a lost cause and filled what remained of the spine glyphs with liquid g/s. Annoying, but it worked better than the crappy painted glyphs I’d inflicted on it.

They are both tall miniatures, the alien god because he’s an alien god and old man Oldman because he’s a 32mm game piece. The towering alien god works as is of course, and in my head I imagine Vlad hovering slightly as he does his dark bidding.

 

 

Silver Bayonet vampire…

And the vampire hussar Madame La Nuit from Black Pyramid Gaming (who also do lots of useful Napoleonic horror characters). Not a very colourful figure as I went with the uniform for the Deaths Head Hussars, but a fun figure if you can handle the braid and lace.

 

Silver Bayonet ghoul

A 3D print from Etsy, it’s sold as a vampire and I was going to use it as such, but realised the feral nature of the mini lent itself more to the ghoul. The broken plinth is from the Renedra graveyard sprue and just gave it a bit of height.

 

Size Comparisons

 Ok, so I do love the Bloody Miniatures range. Lovely sculpts. But... I’m torn on the size. They work with some figures, not so much with others... they make Angel Blake look more childlike which I like, but she’s nude which is wrong on sooo many levels. The old woman is minute and looks odd, but the blacksmith just looks stout and solid. The bishop looks small, but he did against the Mantic ghouls anyway. The Cardinal is shortish, but not terribly so... but the Warlord cavalry men are tiny, even against a Warlord plastic infantry (which is the witch hunter base figure.

Decisions, decisions... sigh...

Meats back on the menu boys!

A dead cow from Warlord... not much to say about this to be honest. Nice model, done with contrast paints in various layers and blended... mainly Darkoath Flesh, Apothecary White and Gulliman Flesh. Hooves in an off white.

Revenants (well zombies but hey...)

OK, so finally got a photo session and so here are the zombies from a while back... not sure my camera is at it's best anymore, it doesn't remember the date or settings when it's turned off... but hey, better pics than I've been managing....

So... Mantic zombies with a variety of g/s to just 17thC them up a bit...

base figures with a bit of g/s to vary clothing and poses a wee bit...

and as an equal opportunities necromancer some lady corpses... g/s for boobs, although one has a boob ripped off as I couldn't get them even. She also has a missing hand, as it seemed unlikely that so many would be carrying around a fresh hand for snacking, so lopped off and a bit of wire for bone and g/s for flesh...

ghouls, ghouls, ghouls...

finally got around to getting some paint on my ghouls...

annoyingly, what stalled me was what colours to paint them - I'm fine with uniforms and Timelords and what have you, but as soon as I need to decide on a colour, I really do ponder too much... in the end I just picked out the earthy tones from paints, and slapped it on... so it's kind of a slap dash job to an extent as I didn't want to be thinking about the colours too much... it kind of worked - a nice surprise was the WW2 German Uniform green... will use that more for this project I think...

these three are basic Mantic ghouls (although not sure what the camera was focusing on as the faces are a bit blurry)... some minor g/s on the back for the joins...

next were four Mantic ghouls that were heavily g/s'd for the 17th century vibe... quite chuffed with the frilly shirt on the red chap...

finally, a mix and match with Mantic bits added to Warlord plastic ECW figures... the female ghoul is converted from a Redoubt Enterprises ECW villager (with buckets on a yoke thing)...


went with a green grey for the basic skin colour, highlighted up with white and washed with mainly purple, but the odd splosh of green for a unhealthy shade... not a huge fan of lashings of blood and gore and I suspect others may have gone a bit paler, but I quite like the inhuman greyness... similarly I like the all white eyes, but may try some small pupils with a rotring pen or something... gums are also purple if you can manage to see them... I also added a fallen gravestone to one of the bases to go with the priest...